Towards a Platform for Widespread Embedded Intelligence - ERCIM

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EVENTS
ECDL 2006 - 10th European Conference
on Digital Libraries
by M.Felisa Verdejo
The tenth European Conference on Digital Libraries was held at the University of
Alicante, Spain from September 17 to 22, 2006. The event was jointly organised
by the University of Alicante, Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library and Universidad
Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED).
The theme of this year's conference was
Towards the European Digital Library.
The aim was to emphasise the contribution
made by the European Digital
Library research community (and its
liaisons with the international research
community in general) to the current
efforts of the European Commission in
this direction. Speakers were invited to
elaborate on this topic and the conference
opened with a commemorative talk
by Dr. Yannis Ioannidis looking back on
the history of the ECDL. A CD-ROM is
now available to the DL research community
containing the proceedings of all
the ECDL Conferences.
Although strongly international, the conference
retained a distinctive European
flavour. The 459 participants came from
45 countries: 66 percent were from
Europe (26 countries), 23 percent from
America, nine percent from Australasia
and two percent from Africa.
The event followed the usual format of
ECDL conferences consisting of a main
conference, a doctoral consortium workshop,
five tutorials, posters and demonstrations
(this year there were 33), six
workshops and the Cross-Language
Evaluation Forum (CLEF), a major
event on its own, with 140 participants.
The three guest speakers were Horst
Foster, Director of Content in the
Information Society and Media DG of
the European Commission, who presented
the Digital Libraries Initiative,
one of the flagships of the i2010 strategic
framework; Ricardo Baeza, director of
Yahoo! Research Barcelona (Spain) and
Yahoo! Research Latin America in
Santiago (Chile), who focused on the
potential of exploiting users' behaviour
in search processes and Michael Keller,
librarian at Ida M. Green University,
Stanford, USA, who presented Google
Book Search, a book-indexing project,
and its benefits to readers and publishers,
as well as a catalyst for other initiatives
such as The European Digital Library.
A panel discussing the topic Sustained
Digital Libraries for Universal Use was
chaired by Ching-chih Chen of Simmons
Ching-chih Chen of Simmons College, Boston, USA.
College, Boston, USA and José
Borbinha of INESC-ID, Portugal. They
were joined by Abdelaziz Abid from
UNESCO, Vittore Casarosa from
DELOS and Eric van der Meulen from
the European Library.
Some 36 papers were selected for the
main conference, an acceptance rate of
28 percent. Papers were organised in 12
sessions around the topics: Architecture
(I, II), Preservation, Retrieval,
Applications, Methodology, Metadata,
Evaluation, User Studies, Modelling,
Audiovisual content and Languages
Technologies. The event was broadcast
live on the Internet.
The doctoral consortium was scheduled
the day before the conference at the same
time as the tutorials in order to allow
both seniors and students to fully participate
in the conference itself. Two
awards were made. The Best Paper
Award, supported by the IEEE Technical
committee on Digital Libraries (IEEE-
TCDL) went to Carl Lagoze, Dean
Krafft, Tim Cornwell, Dean Eckstrom,
Susan Jesuroga and Chris Wilper for the
paper Representing Contextualised
Information in the NSDL, and the Best
Young Researcher Award, supported by
DELOS Network of Excellence on
Digital Libraries, went to Daniel Coelho
Gomes, Universidade de Lisboa, as
coauthor of the paper Design and
Selection Criteria for a National Web
Archive.
As well as the scientific programme,
ECDL 2006 included a full range of
social activities allowing participants to
ERCIM News No. 67, October 2006
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